You know, it's been a while since I made a Fire Mage guide, let's fix that. [Music]

Alright, let's start with a quick introduction. My name is Preheat, and I am the Wowhead guide writer for Fire Mage and Devastation Evoker. Today's video is going to cover the basics, so we'll have you covered regardless of whether you're new to Mage or if you've been playing it since Shaolins.

We'll be covering all the essentials, such as talents, gear stats, trinkets, consumables, current tier bonuses in 10.0.7 (which hopefully you already have), tier bonuses in 10.1 (which hopefully you'll get), cooldowns, and the rotation with gameplay samples for single target and AOE. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started.

Oh, also, just a standard disclaimer: I'm making this video before patch 10.1, so there's definitely a chance that things will change.

Alright, so to start things off, let's talk about the new Talent system in Dragonflight. The idea is that they allow for more experimentation, having more options, being able to kind of path through the tree however you want, and giving you that freedom. That being said, the only real changes you'll make are two utility talents over here on the left side of the Mage tree. So that's going to be stuff like picking up Spellsteal, maybe picking up Remove Curse if you need to be able to remove curses.

Also, Dragon's Breath is very, very good in Mythic Plus. Obviously, stuff like Blast Wave is also very useful, but the big thing is just that you pick up the throughput talent. That's going to be stuff like Overflowing Energy, Rune of Power, Shifting Power, and also Time Warp. In addition to the Tomes, if you have those, you pretty much have everything covered, and then everything else is kind of up to you. Also, notice that we have a new talent here that's actually not new; some people probably recognize it if you've played Frost or if you played Mage previously. But that we have Ice Flows versus Shimmer.

This is actually a choice node right here in the middle, and I'm going to let you know right now, even if you are very familiar with Shimmer and this is your cozy option, your go-to, you're probably going to want to get good at using Ice Flows. Ice Flows is an essential talent for every Fire Mage, and there are definitely situations where you might opt for Shimmer just because you need the movement, such as Mythic Resogat. But I'd say, in general, Ice Flows is probably the more correct answer between these two.

Moving on, let's talk about the Fire Mage spec tree. The first thing you're probably going to notice is that you're missing Flamestrike if you've been playing in Shaolins. You probably had the spell before and now you're wondering where it went. We don't pick Flamestrike at all. We use just our ignites off the main target that build on the main target and then are spread through Fire Blast or Phoenix Flame casts, and that's going to do all the AOE we would ever need. So, this is pretty much the build you run in every situation. You don't really change it at all.

In fact, the only talent on this entire thing that you would ever really consider changing is Cauterize. That is simply if you want to get rid of your cheat death for slightly more damage, you drop Cauterize just like so and you pick up Call.

You probably recognize it, and this is why we want to be running Ice Flows - it pairs really well with Pyroclasm. I'd say that a fire mage's playstyle is defined by this talent. So, if you don't like the playstyle of hard-casting Power Blast (and I wouldn't blame you), this is probably not the spec for you. Regardless, we obviously love Sun King's Blessing because it gives us a lot of Combustion uptime, and the more Combustion uptime we have, the more Sun King's Blessing procs we're able to generate. This is because those come from Hot Streaks, and Hot Streaks are primarily from Combustion. There's a feedback loop here, as more Combustion uptime means more Sun King's Blessing stacks, and more Sun King's Blessing stacks means more Combustion uptime.

The only other thing I should talk about here that's different from previous expansions is the talent for Temporal Warp. Even though this has been a legendary in the past, it actually works differently now because you're able to stack your Lust buff with your own Lust. If you use Time Warp on the pull and then immediately click Time Warp again, you'll gain two different Haste buffs: one is called Time Warp, and one is called Temporal Warp. They both give you 30 Haste for 40 seconds. This is very important for a fire mage, and we'll be talking about this more when we get to the rotation and gameplay examples.

Also, a quick note on the talents - once we get the new Tier gear in 10.1, we'll have access to Tempered Flames and also Alexstraza's Fury as talent options that are viable. I won't talk about this too much because I want to stay focused on 10.0.7 for now, and we'll save this for the rotational portion. Just be aware that once you get the new tier in 10.1, your options for talents will open up.

Next up is gear, and to talk about gear, we have to first talk about stats.

As a fire mage, your primary stat is going to be Intelligence, which increases your spell damage. Everything made for a fire mage will have this stat on it, except for jewelry and some other special items like trinkets. But typically, you don't have to worry about Intelligence - it just comes with the gear depending on the item level.

Then you have your secondary stats, which are Haste, Mastery, Versatility, and Crit in that order. Haste is obviously your best stat, and you want to stack as much haste as possible in addition to Mastery. The other two are just kind of whatever - you don't care too much about Versatility, and you don't want Critical Strikes. Typically, your stats, since you only have two slots for secondary stats on your gear, will be Haste and Mastery. You just want to have every single piece with just Haste and Mastery on it, and you'll probably be good to go as long as you have those two.

There are some exceptions, though. Like the engineering bracers have only one stat on them, obviously, go Haste in this case. But aside from that, it's just pretty much whatever you can fit into your gear. There are some other special items as well. The Elemental Lariat is probably an item you've heard about - it's an embellished item, which basically means it has a very small effect on it that gives you anywhere from a 0.5% to 1% DPS increase.

It is not exactly easy to obtain because it is a very rare item, but there is a trick to obtaining it. If you only kill the first two bosses every week and don't pollute your Mythic with any other kills, it will force the loot table to only pull from these seven items. This greatly increases your chance of gaining the item. So, just a little tip for you: don't kill any bosses on Mythic until you find this thing. You can kill as many as you want on heroic and lower - that's totally fine. Just make sure you're only clearing to a specific Mythic every week and only the same bosses.

When it comes to other trinkets, we have a lot of options to choose from, such as Invoker's Codex, Horn of Valor, The Void, My New Shadow Gym, and Show Globe. These are all fairly good trinkets, but they will also be replaced in the patch. There are a lot of options for new trinkets, but we don't really fully know where they're going to land right now because many of them are probably going to be tuned quite a bit.

This one seems like it's going to be our best in slot though - the Idol of Chaotic Arrogance. This is a crit trinket, which is obviously not great for us, but it does have the effect where we just get 300 in the lights with a proc. It turns out that the Phoenix Flame actually counts as an area of effect spell, so we will be proccing this quite often.

There are some other really neat trinkets, such as the Beacon to the Beyond. This one is such a cool trinket because it has an effect where you just pop something really, really hard with it. However, this thing only really scales with crit and versatility, and since crit and verse are our worst stats as a Fire Mage, it's probably not likely that we actually want this trinket. Also, it doesn't work with combustion, so any dreams about using combustion and making this autocrit are just not going to pan out.

Other trinkets, like the Seething Black Dragon Scale, are actually quite good. It isn't crit strike; it's actually haste. I don't know why the tooltip is wrong, but yeah, it's okay. Obviously, we have some other trinkets that just aren't fully implemented yet, so we can only speculate at this point. But, I'm sure that once we have the patch, stuff like the Time-Breaching Talon, Hear this Fragment, Spoils of Neldarius - I'm sure these are going to be fairly good trinkets because they seem to be pretty good at 372. Obviously, we'll be able to get them all the way up to 421 in the patch.

For more information on this, check the description below for my Wowhead guide link, and also the subcreation for Fire Mage and the Blood Mallet for stats. This stuff automatically updates, so it's going to be the best, most up-to-date place to find out what is going to be best for you to use.

When it comes to enhancements and consumables, you can find the full list on my Wowhead. I'm just going to give you a quick list right now. Obviously, you have sockets on your gear, so make sure to plug those holes with your illuminated diamonds. You can only have one of those, and the rest put in these Keen Yes Emeralds.

The best all-around file also reduces the damage you take, and it's really cheap. So it's great all-around. Whatever you do, don't get the Ice file of Corrupting Rage. It's terrible. It gives you crit, which you don't want, and it also causes you to take damage, which you don't want either. Just avoid it.

When it comes to potions, the Elemental potion of Ultimate Power is great if you're rich. If you're not, then you can always get the off-brand version, which is the Elemental potion of Power. There's no shame in that. But if you want to seem like you've got a Gucci belt on, make sure you're using Elemental potions of Ultimate Power every pull.

When it comes to food buffs, I recommend the Devilishly Deviled Eggs. This is a new recipe that came in 10.0.7. You can just buy them on the auction house. They're super cheap. Also, refreshing healing potions are just great all-around, so always have these in your bag. It's good to get into the habit of using them whenever you're about to die. Obviously, in a raid, you need to be a little bit more careful with how you use them, but they're just all-around great, especially for a class that doesn't have a direct way to heal itself without cooldowns.

Just a heads up, this next part is going to be super basic. If you already understand this part, go ahead and skip forward to the next chapter where we talk about how to actually play and use your rotation.

Alright, let's talk about Mage abilities. I'm not going to talk about each and every ability individually because it would take too much time to cover. If you want more information on the abilities themselves, you can always check out my Wowhead guide. You can also just place your cursor over the ability in your Spellbook, and it'll show you a tooltip, giving you an idea of what the ability does.

First up is Arcane Intellect. This just gives us an intellect buff of five percent, and it's also a raid buff. So, anyone in the raid is going to receive this benefit, which is really nice.

Next up is Blazing Barrier. If you press this button, you get a 20 absorb shield over your health.

Next up is Blink. Blink just teleports us forward and breaks us out of stuns. It also gets rid of roots. There are talents that modify Blink, so you can pick up a talent that basically converts it into another ability. It is off the GCD, called Shimmer. You can actually cast while you're casting, as well. GCD is a term that refers to Global Cooldown.

So basically, if you press an ability, and you notice that on your bar, you're not able to press another ability while that ability is recovering, basically, everything's recovering at the same time. That is what is called the global cooldown.

There are some abilities that are off the global cooldown, such as your Counterspell, which interrupts targets. So if you use a GCD and you press Counterspell, it's still going to work. You can still interrupt while you're on the GCD. But obviously, if you're casting a spell, let's say you're in the middle of casting, you try to cast Counterspell, that's not going to work. You have to interrupt your cast and then cast Counterspell.

"Amount of damage" but that's not the real reason we actually use it. We like Fireball because it has the ability to crit. You don't need to worry about crit as a stat, obviously, we already mentioned that before when we went over stats, but we do care a lot about critting. One crit is going to give us "heating up".

Heating up is basically the first stage of hot streak, right? So, if something is heating up, it allows us to then convert it into a hot streak if we get a second crit. The reason why we want to generate hot streak is that it allows us to instant cast our next ability, Power Blast. We want to use Power Blast as an instacast, right? So, whenever we have a hot streak, we're actually able to just cast Pyroblast instantly, just like so.

That's what the Fire Mage rotation is all about. It's about converting heating ups into hot streaks and then using those hot streaks as instant cast Power Blasts. How we convert these abilities into hot streaks typically is by getting a crit and then using this ability, Fire Blast. Fire Blast is just instant, it's off the GCD, you can cast it while casting. You just press it, it deals damage, and it's going to always crit.

That way, you can just convert your heating up into a hot streak automatically with it, very nice for that. Then, we also have Phoenix Flame, so Phoenix Flame is a really cool spell. It shoots out like this Phoenix, right? Typically, we want to hold on to our Phoenix Flames though, we don't really want to use them if we have this Talent, "From the Ashes".

But of course, there's also Alexstraza's Fury, which makes it so that our Phoenix Flames always crit. That Talent obviously has an added incentive for Phoenix Flame. We don't really play that yet, but we will in 10.1, or at least we have the option to once we unlock our new Tier gear. Next up is Scorch. Scorch is just a cast that has no travel time, it just instantly hits the enemy. It's very, very low in damage, has a low crit chance, but the reason why we like Scorch is that in execute, whenever an enemy's health gets lower, below 30, then Scorch is a guaranteed Critical Strike and it deals increased damage.

Okay, outside of cooldowns, basically the whole idea of the rotation is you're trying to cast Fireballs to get heating up, and then once we get those hot streaks, we're able to cast them. As you can see, the rotation looks something kind of like this typically. Now, I'm not going to react to any of these buffs because I haven't explained them yet, but basically, you can see here the instant cast Power Blasts are going off, they're dealing damage, right? And I can just continue to attack this target dummy. The reason why I'm critting every hit, by the way, is because of this Talent right here, Firestarter. Whenever a target is above 90 Health, you're going to always crit.

Next up is cooldowns. So, for cooldowns, the first thing we should talk about is Rune of Power. A Rune of Power just places a rune on the ground right under your feet, and while you're in that room, you're going to have increased damage. This is going to increase our damage by 40, it lasts around 12 seconds, and whenever we pop our main cooldown, Combustion, which we haven't talked about yet.

The last and most important cooldown of all is combustion. You press the button and your character becomes on fire. Everything that you do while you're in combustion is going to crit. Combustion is just 100% crit. It also drops a ring of power under us automatically so that you don't have to cast through the power before you go into combustion. There are a couple of different ways you can go into combustion. Obviously, you can just press the button. We also have Sun King's Blessing as we've mentioned before. Whenever we use eight hot streaks and then we hardcast the Pyroblast, this is going to give us six seconds of combustion and this one is not going to drop the ring of power.

That's pretty much everything you need to know about the Mage abilities and rotation. It's important to remember that there are variations and optimizations depending on the situation, such as switching to different abilities or talents for certain fights or encounters.

One thing to keep in mind is that mastering a class and its abilities takes time and practice. Don't be discouraged if you don't get it right away. Keep practicing and experimenting to find what works best for you and your playstyle.

Overall, the Mage class is a versatile and powerful class in World of Warcraft. With the right strategy and understanding of the abilities and rotation, you can deal a significant amount of damage and contribute greatly to your team's success in raids and dungeons.

Just to be clear, the Fire Mage rotation itself basically has four phases to it. You start off with Firestarter, and that's basically everything that happens above 90 Health. This is just everything you do in the open air before your first combustion. Then you have your combustion phase where you're actually dealing damage with combustion. You're in your cooldowns and obviously, you're carrying SKBs as much as you can. Then outside of that, you have your normal rotation, which is what you do outside of combustion and SKB whenever you're just buying time between cooldowns. The last portion is going to be Searing Touch, and that's whenever the target is below 30 Health. Basically, in Searing Touch, all you do is swap out your Fireball for Scorch. That's really it.

The open air itself can be broken down with the following graphic, and if you need to, go ahead and pause if you want to review this portion. But you also notice that the timeline is also showing the spells in order as well. We're going to show the sequence for the open air at half speed. So, you hardcast your Pyroblast into a Rune of Power, Double Lust Potion, and also Fire Blast. Everything crits because we're in Firestarter. So, we use Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Pyroblast into Shifting Power, Fire Blast, Pyroblast, Fire Blast, Pyroblast.

And then we're going to cast a Fireball here, and we're trying to maintain Field of Burn, that's our talent. Whenever we use Fire Blast, it gives us this little buff, so we're keeping us at three stacks. We hardcast SKB at the very end. We combustion and Fire Blast, and then we start to run out Power Blasts.

The order here, the priority is Fire Blast is number one, number two is going to be Pyroclasm, number three is going to be Phoenix Flames if you have less than 10 seconds worth of combustion left, number four is going to be Fireball if you have over 100 haste, which we do have over 100 haste here, and then obviously less is going to be Scorch. But yeah, it's all just about using your Fire Blast. Basically, just use everything on cooldown as much as you can, and obviously, use those Power Clasms and procs too, but try to save one if you're about to get an SKB Sun King's Blessing soon.

As you can see here, when the Power is coming up very soon here, so what we're going to do is we're going to get the last bit of juice out of our combustion here. We're going to drop the Ring of Power and we're going to start hardcasting this Pyroblast. At the very end, we re-up the Field of Burn, right, and then we start throwing out the Power Blasts again.

You get to combustion, and then here's what happens: once you're in combustion, obviously we have more information on what to do outside of combustion. This is all on while I had the link, which will be in the description below. I know it's very complicated, but it's something that you just have to practice, right? That's the only way you'll really get it down.

Outside of cooldowns, we're pretty much just biding our time and trying to set up for the next set. So, you just try to get your SKB ready, obviously use Shifting Power on cooldown, and try to use Rune Power leading into SKB whenever you have that available, and combustion isn't coming up soon. Also, whenever you're shifting power, make sure that you have all your Fire Blasts on cooldown first - it's very important. But yes, like in this case, Rune Power is coming up, so I just get a Power Blast ready, I cast through the power, and then I'm going to begin casting this SKB Fire Blast at the very end and then just do kind of like a little mini combustion here - same logic as before.

And yeah, that'll lead me straight into my next combustion, like my real combustion here, and then we have SKB available with Power Clasm keeping that field of burn upright. Obviously, since we don't have so much lust, we'll be just using Scorch and Phoenix Flame as we end up at the very end of this combustion here. But yeah, I mean, this is the idea - it's much slower whenever you're no longer in your cooldowns, and be really careful there. You saw that I just refreshed my field of burn slightly too late, and it ended up falling off during combustion - that's really bad, you don't want that to happen.

Basically, to recap, you do your Firestarter, you do combustion, and then outside of that, you're just kind of fishing for more SKBs. You're using Power Clasms as they come up, and then in execute, you obviously want to be using Scorch instead and be more careful about using your Fire Blast, right? Because you always want to kind of go into combustion with some Fire Blasts available.

Be careful about doing that whenever you're in execute, just because in execute, it's obviously a little bit easier since you're going to have guaranteed hot streaks, so save your Fire Blasts then. Outside of that, just try to use your shifting power on cooldown as long as your Rune Power is on cooldown, and combustion too - I mean, you should pretty much just use it as soon as you get rid of your Fire Blast, generally speaking. And obviously, use your Bloodlust again as a personal cooldown whenever it's up.

And yeah, that's it. It's more complicated than it seems just because the opener is kind of technical, but once you get the opener down, that's not too bad. Also, one thing that's really nice is the rotation is basically the same in AOE, except for you also can use Dragon's Breath and Ice Nova as well. So, I mean, AOE is all just about spreading your Ignite cleave, right? And the best way to get Ignite is just to do your single target rotation and try to pick a target that has a lot of health. You obviously don't want your target to die while you're attacking it - that would be tragic because you would lose your Ignite.

Remember, whenever you're actually inside of combustion, everything crits, so you're just alternating casts. Basically, the whole goal is to cast as many hot streak Pyroblasts as possible.

Essentially, you're using everything on cooldown, but you're trying to bank it enough so that you have your Fire Blasts and your other important procs for Combustion. You're also trying to have a certain tempo with it, right? Because if you look at Feel the Burn, it's kind of like what decides the tempo, and you always want to re-up Feel the Burn kind of towards the end. Here you can see how I'm waiting until the very end to press Fire Blast because I want to make sure that I'm keeping that buff up.

Maintaining Feel the Burn is very important, and then you're also trying to make sure that you have your procs up whenever you're actually getting your cast off. Sometimes, you want to hold on to those procs for a little bit longer because it might line up better with SKB, such as in this case, I just did it with Power Plasm.

You're just trying to make sure that you make good use of your other cooldowns like Rune of Power and stuff like that because of how Feel the Burn determines the tempo that you play Fire Mage. A lot of people consider this class to feel almost like a rhythm game, so definitely think of it that way if you're having trouble with it.

Also, just remember to always be casting. If you're casting a spell, then at least you're doing some damage. It may not be the right spell, but it's going to be doing more damage than if you're just running around or idling or just not pressing Scorch on the move or something like that.

Okay, I've saved tier bonuses for last because I also kind of want to talk about the rotation in 10.1. At this point, I feel like this is a good moment to kind of give a disclaimer as well. So for 10.1, I do have a sample sequence in here, a couple of them actually.

If you want to see the rotation kind of like how I broke down the rotation earlier, just really want to drive that point home that this is still very early. I'm making this before 10.1, it's very likely something changes. You can play Temper Flame if you want, you can play Improved Combustion, you can play From the Ashes, you can play Alexstrasza's Fury.

This is all what the new tier bonus gives us. So as it is right now, it seems like doing two SKBs into your first Combustion is the way to go, but obviously, that's not going to be realistic on every fight. Not every fight is going to let you just cast for like 20 seconds before you go into your cooldowns, and that's going to make your cooldowns really, really long. So it could be very disruptive if there's mechanics and stuff happening. But anyways, I just want to give that as my last disclaimer, and let's go ahead and talk to your bonuses now.

The tier bonus in 10.0 is the Bindings of the Crystal Scholar. This is just a flat damage increase, so nothing too special about it, but it's definitely not too bad. And then in 10.1, we have a new set bonus called the Underlight Conjure's Brilliance, and this basically makes it so whenever we apply Phoenix Flame to our targets, we get this nice little debuff that makes them take additional damage.

So if you remember from before, we had a talent called From the Ashes. This talent basically makes it so that there's an incentive for us to not use Phoenix Flame because we want to save our Mastery, and using Phoenix Flame decreases our Mastery. But the set bonus gives us an incentive to actually use Phoenix.

When it comes to the actual play style, it's very different than what you might expect. I'm gonna go ahead and show you what this looks like on the PTR right now and keep in mind, this is still very early, right? Obviously, this could change a lot, but just to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, this is what it looks like if you use Alexstrasza's Fury and Tempered Flames with the 10.1 tier bonus in your opener.

I'm going to go ahead and let this one play out. So, just to show another example right in the opener, you're going to pre-cast your Pyroblast, which is obviously a much faster cast since you have Tempered Flames, and then you're going to double lust, use your potion immediately, use Phoenix Flame, and to run the power into Pyroblast, and then you're going to use Fireblast, Power Blast, Fireblast, Power Blast, Fire plus Power Blast, Shifting Power, Fire plus Power plus Dragon's Breath, Pyroblast, Phoenix Flame, Pyroblast, and then from there, you're going to go straight into your SKB. And then you're going to play out your SKB like you normally played out and then on your second SKB, that's when you actually activate combustion, right here. So as you can see, we had just activated combustion, right? And keep in mind, we have over 100 haste here, so we are actually hard casting Fireballs in combustion if we don't have other good options.

And, yeah, obviously, you have a lot of Phoenix Flames, right? The Phoenix Flame damage is quite high as well because the Phoenix Flame has 200 increased damage with the tier bonus, and as you can see as we close out here, we have a Rune of Power down and we have an SKB currently proced, so we are ready to continue the burn.

Alright, and with that, I'm gonna go ahead and tap out of this video. If you do like this video, I really, really hope that you press that like button. Smash it if you have to. If you want to see more of my content, be sure to subscribe as well. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that I like to do every once in a while, right? And, it's just, it's a lot of work, but anyways, it's 3:40 am, I'm gonna get some sleep. Hit the sub button, just do it. It's like 60 of y'all who watch my videos don't even subscribe to my videos. It's time. If you made it to the end of the video, this is your sign, hit the sub button. Okay, anyways, that's it. Thank you all for watching, I'll see you in the next one. Bye!